was bound to notice, and they had; by the time Wolgast had brought her in, everybody from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol to the U.S. Marshals was scouring the country for her, and Richards, that lunatic, had left a trail of bodies a mile wide. The nuns at the convent, shot in their sleep. A pair of small-town cops. Six people at a coffee shop whose only mistake was coming in for breakfast at the same time as Wolgast and the girl.
But the request for the girl, which had come from Lear himself, was nothing Guilder could make himself refuse. Each of the cons had been infected with a slightly altered variant of the virus, though the effects had been the same. Illness, coma, transformation, and the next thing you knew they were hanging upside down from the ceiling, gutting a rabbit. But the Amy variant was different. It hadn’t come from Fanning, the Columbia biochemist who’d been infected on Lear’s misbegotten excursion to Bolivia; it had come from the group of tourists who’d started the whole thing—terminal cancer patients on a lark in the jungle with an ecotour group called Last Wish. They’d all died within a month: stroke, heart attack, aneurysm, their bodies blowing apart. But in the meantime, they’d shown remarkable improvements in their condition—one man had even grown back a full head of hair—and they’d all died cancer-free. Reading Lear’s mind was a fool’s errand, but he’d come to believe this variant was the answer. The trick was keeping the first test subject alive. For this he’d chosen Amy, a young, healthy girl.
And it had worked. Guilder knew it had worked. Because Amy was still alive.
Guilder’s office, on the third floor of an otherwise nondescript low-rise federal office building in Fairfax County—DSW shared space with, among other entities, the Office of Technology Assessment, the Department of Homeland Security Special Energy Task Force, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a day care—looked out on Interstate 66. Monday of Memorial Day weekend, yet there was almost no traffic. A lot of people had left the city already. Guilder imagined a lot of chits were being called in. A mother-in-law in upstate New York. A friend with a cabin in the mountains. But with all air transportation grounded, people could get only so far, and it wouldn’t make much difference in the end. You couldn’t hide from nature forever. Or so Horace Guilder had been told.
The girl had made it out of Colorado somehow. They’d caught her signature in southern Wyoming in the first few hours. Which meant she was in a vehicle, and not alone—somebody had to be driving. After that, she’d disappeared. The transmitter in her biomonitor was short-range, too weak for the satellites; she had to be within a few miles of a cell tower, and not some rural co-op but one connected to the federal tracking network. Which, in southern Wyoming, as long as you stayed off major highways, would be easy to avoid. She could be anywhere now. Whoever was with her was smart.
A knock at the door broke his train of thought; Guilder swiveled from the window to see Nelson, the department’s chief technical officer, standing in the doorway. Christ, what now?
“I have good news and bad news,” Nelson announced.
Nelson was dressed, as always, in a black T-shirt and jeans, his dirty feet shoved into a pair of flip-flops. A fast-talking Rhodes scholar with not one but two PhDs from MIT—biochemistry and advanced information systems—Nelson was the smartest guy in the building by a mile, a fact that he knew only too well. He still had the young person’s predisposition to regard the world as a series of vaguely irritating problems created by people less cool and smart than he was. Though their relationship was cordial, Nelson had a habit of treating Guilder like a doddering elderly parent, a figure of respect but no longer quite worthy—which was exasperating, coming from a guy who seemed to comb his hair every fourth day, though not, Guilder had to admit, entirely unwarranted. He was twenty-eight to Guilder’s fifty-seven, and everything about Nelson conspired to make him feel old.
“Any sign of her?”
“Nada.” Nelson scratched his scraggly beard. “We’re not getting any of them.”
Guilder rubbed his eyes, which stung of sleeplessness. He needed to go home for a shower and a clean suit. He hadn’t left the office in two days, grabbing only a few winks on the couch and living on junk from the vending machines. He was having trouble with his fingers, too. Numbness, tingling.
“You said something about good news?”
“Depends on how you look at it. From a free-speech point of view, probably it’s not the best, but it looks like somebody finally shut down that lunatic in Denver. My guess would be NSA, or else one of Lear’s little pets finally got to him. Either way, the dude’s off-line in a permanent way.”
Last Stand in Denver: Guilder had watched his videos, like everybody else. You had to hand it to the guy for balls. Theories abounded about his identity, the general consensus being that he was ex-military, Special Forces or SEALs.
“So what’s the bad?”
“New numbers just came in from the CDC. It seems the original algorithm failed to take into proper account just how much these things like to eat. Which I could have told them if they’d asked. Either that or some summer intern moved a decimal place when he was daydreaming about the last time he boned his girlfriend.”
Sometimes talking with Nelson felt like trying to corral a five-year-old. A genius five-year-old, but still. “Please, just spit it out.”
Nelson shrugged. “As it now stands, based on the most recent projections, it appears we’re looking at a more succinct timeline. Something on the order of thirty-nine days.”
“For the coasts you mean?”
“Um, not exactly.”
“What then?”
“The entire North American continent.”
A gray shadow swooped over Guilder’s vision; he had to sit down.
“A response is already in the works at Central,” Nelson continued. “My guess is they’ll try to burn it out. Major population centers first, then anyone else who gets left behind.”
“Christ almighty.”
Nelson frowned. “Small price to pay, on the whole. I know what I’d do if I were, say, the president of Russia. No way I’d let this jump the pond.”
The man was right, and Guilder knew it. He realized his right hand had begun to tremble. He reached for it with his left, trying to bring the spasms under control while also making the gesticulation seem natural.
“You okay there, boss?”
His right foot had begun to shake as well. He felt the incomprehensible urge to laugh. Probably it was the stress. He swallowed effortfully, a taste of bile in his throat.
“Find that girl.”
Once Nelson was gone, Guilder sat in his office for a few minutes, trying to collect himself. The trembling had passed, but not the impulse to laugh—a symptom euphemistically known as “emotional incontinence.” Finally he just gave in, ejecting a single, cleansing bark. Jesus, he sounded possessed. He hoped nobody outside had heard.
He departed the building, got his car from the garage—a beige Toyota Camry—and drove to his townhouse in Arlington. He wanted to clean himself up, but this suddenly seemed like work; he poured himself a Scotch and flipped on the TV. It hadn’t taken long for each of the networks, right down to the Weather Channel, to brand the emergency with a catchy slogan (“Nation in Crisis,” etc.), and all the broadcasters looked harried and sleep- deprived, especially the ones reporting from beside a highway somewhere—a cornfield in the background, long lines of vehicles creeping past, everybody pointlessly honking. The whole country was seizing up like a bad transmission. He checked his watch: 8:05. In less than an hour, the middle of the country would go dark.
He heaved his disobedient body from the couch and climbed the stairs. Stairs—that had been a concern for the future. What would he do when he could no longer climb the stairs? But it hardly mattered now. In the master bath he turned on the shower and stripped to his shorts, standing before the mirror while the water heated. The funny thing was, he didn’t look especially sick. A little thinner, perhaps. There was a time when he’d thought of himself as athletic—he’d run cross-country at Bowdoin—though those days were long past. His line of work, with its attendant demands for secrecy, had made marriage impossible, but well into his forties Guilder had managed—well, if not to turn heads exactly, then at least to keep himself occupied. A series of discreet affairs, everyone apprised of the facts. He had prided himself on the well-managed quality of these encounters, but then one day it had all simply stopped. Glances that might have been returned slid past him, conversations that before had merely served as elaborate preambles went no place. Inevitable, Guilder supposed, but nothing to cheer about. He surveyed his reflection, taking stock. A square-jawed face that had once looked rugged but had long since sagged at the jowls. A